Abstract [en]

Geographic Information System (GIS) is a technology that can help collect, edit, store, manage, transform, analyze and represent data. This research aimed to show how mobile GIS application can be designed, developed and applied to electric field work. An Android mobile application, which had been integrated with GIS was developed in Java. The prototype was tested and evaluated by employees of China Southern Power Grid (CSG).

The resulting mobile application had three important features and functionalities: map view, location and electrical object querying, and attribute viewing and editing. According to the results of the user testing, the advantages of the application were its improved performance as brought about by the different scales used in the maps, its clear layout, and the speed of completing the query tasks. The disadvantages, on the other hand, were restrictions in the data types used and the query window.

The study showed that with wireless communication, GPS and Location-based (LBS) supplements, electric utilities can benefit from this mobile GIS application in the following aspects: 1) eliminate the obstacles of going out in the field; 2) increase the flexibility of field work by faster access to data; 3) increase the accuracy and efficiency of field workers by dealing with the querying and editing task, and field mapping on a portable devices in real time. According to these aspects, electric field work can easily be enhanced by saving time, resources, and costs.